2008Q2 Grant Proposals

To this post follows a set of posts with proposals received by the Perl Foundation grants committee during the second call for grant proposals for 2008. Although not usual, the rules of the TPF GC are changing and we hope to make this a rule. Proposals are accepted during one month and after that period, they are posted for public discussion on the Internet. This is important to make GC more aware of the community interest on the project, and to help opening the grants attribution process.

Please take some time on reading the proposals carefully and give some feedback on the relevance of the proposals.

NOTE: This discussion period will end May 10. Starting that date, the GC will begin the voting process. Please comment on each specific grant post or, if you want to give a broad opinion and comparison on the proposed grants, please comment this post. Thanks!

NOTE2: There are five new projects submitted by Michael Schwern. Although they were received one day later they were accepted because Michael sent some emails to me asking for one more day.

Tags:

4 Comments

I feel that the following should be preferred (in this order):
1. svn.cpan.org
2. Archive::Zip
3. Perl-on-a-Stick
4. Blog::Normalize
5. CatalystX::Installer
6. SMOP

I also feel that the DBEditor should be un-preferred in its current form.

A few comments on specific proposals:
* svn.cpan.org
I think that this should be modelled on svn.ali.as, specifically that everyone has write access to everything. It's SVN - everything is recoverable. Additionally, I think that a trac (or somesuch) installation would be preferable over RT.

* Perl-on-a-Stick
This is probably the most important Perl-specific piece in the whole bunch. If we can get Perl onto mobile devices along with a good GUI toolkit, that would open the floodgates.

* DBEditor
This project, while well-intentioned, just has a whole bunch of potential issues with it. This looks and feels like a MySQL Administrator and that has caused a number of problems DBAs have to come and clean up. Databases aren't the be-all-end-all of data management solutions. I'd much rather see something build upon DBM::Deep or BDB or somesuch vs. a better manager for my bazooka when all I need to get rid of are flies.

Although it is not a sexy area, Archive::Zip really needs the help that the proposal details.

I am the maintainer, but I am not in a position to contribute anything to the module other than to maintain the package itself and do some structural refactoring, when it comes to the actual zip specification I'm of little help.

1. Archive::Zip fixing. Perl's niche is seamless data interchange between applications. To have a compression module not work flawlessly is a black mark on the language.

2. Perl On A Stick. Handy idea, and would probably go a way towards fixing similar deployment issues with Perl.

3. CPAN revision control. Working in an environment where the Production version of Perl can be quite old (if it ain't broke, don't fix it) it would be handy to have older versions of CPAN modules easily accessible.

The other projects aren't as worthy to me. They seem to fall into three categories:

1. projects that have been done before in other incarnations/languages/lifetimes (NetBeans, DBEditor, Survey, SMOP) so don't provide a lot of research or much practical benefit. [We've all seen a Perl IDE before, there are database management systems out there, etc...]

2. projects that are so specific to a development need -- but not my own -- that I really can't get excited about them (Blog::Normalize, POE::Component::IRC, CatalystX::Installer).

3. A Perl 6-dependent project. As if there aren't going to be a flood of books, tutorials, holodeck programs, and learning guides aimed at Perl 6 when it finally becomes a reality.

I think it would useful if we could post ideas for projects and/or ideas for grant proposals somewhere.

There are several projects that I think would be worth doing but for what I either don't have the time or the expertise. I am sure there are many more people with similar ideas. If there was a collection of such ideas others could pick one of those and write proposals based on those.

Maybe the Perl5/6 and Parrot wikis would be a good place to do this.
So I started something here